R is a complete and flexible system for statistical analysis which has become a tool of choice for biologists and biomedical scientists, who need to analyze and visualize large amounts of data. One reason for this success is the availability of many contributed packages, which are available freely and can be installed and run directly from R. In bioinformatics, in particular, most published papers include a link to an R package implementing the methods described in the article. This "First Steps with R" course is addressed to beginners wanting to become familiar with the R environment and master the most common commands to be able to start exploring their own datasets.